. . . this release . . . amply demonstrates the vivid, adventurous and puckishly individual contribution that Ligeti made to late-20th-century music. Alongside the better-known 'clouds', those great, luminous, drifting fogbanks of colour and harmony shot through with solar flares of extreme timbres and registers, the clarity and precision of the early chamber music provide intriguing clues to his later development, whilst the most recent work included . . . offers us clear proof that he never stopped creating unexpected and fascinating sounds and gestures.

Clear and cloudy? Definitely clear. What else would you expect with Pierre Boulez in charge? He leaves extroversion to the singers in "Aventures/Nouvelles Aventures", but I hear more of the notes than on any of the other four versions I know. Ligeti didn't shun old-fashioned virtuosity, he revelled in it, and so do Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Saschko Gawriloff in the late concertos for piano and violin.

. . . there's much to relish here, and if you are after a reasonably comprehensive survey then there's no better place to start. Ligeti's 1960s nonsense music-theatre pieces, "Aventures" and "Nouvelles Aventures", are notriously difficult to project on CD. Impetus and slapstick humour flows from the live stage action, but Pierre Boulez's 1981 version nails the notes with discernible clarity, leaving singers Jane Manning, Mary Thomas and William Pearson to dig into Ligeti's sense of hightened mania. Boulez is again on hand for "Ramifications", a taut and supple exploration of microtonal string textures, and once more the refinement of his ear creates a blueprint . . . "Atmospheres" to "Melodien" is essentially a journey from white-noise texture to a rediscovery of line and counterpoint, and DG's ordering of pieces captures the remarkable momentum with which Ligeti's ideas evolved . . . [String Quartet No 2 is] a masterwork. Its explration of the further reaches of string harmonics collides with plucked mechanics to redefine the sound of the string quartet. Here its played by the LaSalle Quartet, who premiered the work, and their neat approach is in contrast to later 'knowing' versions, where each gestures gets exaggerated and overboiled. The fourth discs climaxes with the violin and piano concertos, late Ligeti, expertly played. Good also to rehear rarer items like the underrated Double Concerto for Flute and Oboe and Ligeti's solo organ piece "Volumina" -- bloodcurdling sounds not for the faint hearted.